It was 3 AM, and the fear was gone. Canadian whiskey chased the paranoid fumes of reefer from Shadow's mind as he sat in the driver's side of his Model B station wagon, waiting for his Libellule Rouge. Prohibition had been lifted nationally two years ago, but the idiots running St. Bernard County still pretended it hadn't; so here he was, just beyond the border between Orleans and St. Bernard, listening to the mosquitoes and crickets. He could hear echoes of the speakeasy's now-silent jazz in their song, and he blamed the reefer.

Rouge had been on her way out the door, when one of her friends, a yellow-gold mongoose, Mina or Misha or some stupid, silly-sweet stage name with breasts the size of small lemons pulled her back inside. Friend? Shadow thought, Not her friend, her coworker. He'd learned that distinction to his sorrow back in ROTC. She had also learned that lesson, and three months ago they'd swapped their stories over whiskey and reefer first, then coffee and cigarettes the next morning. It was Good Friday now, two days before Easter. The National Guard had approved his leave request for the weekend, so now he had all of it to spend with Rouge.

Judging from the volume and shrill timbre of the mongoose woman's voice, he knew it was an argument. About what? Hell, he didn't know. Rouge would probably tell him tomorrow.

A loud, low, thrumming rumble made him jump in his seat, followed by a solid splash from the black pond beside the gravel parking zone: a bull alligator. Shadow started the engine, which prompted another rumble from the unseen reptile. Slowly, he brought the station wagon around so that the driver's side door faced the pond instead of the passenger door. This accomplished two things: it put the car between Rouge's path and the alligator, while also signaling his impatience. It wasn't a long drive to the beach–Glowing Beach, as he'd taken to calling it–but they'd barely catch the whole show before the ocean sunrise if Rouge didn't get her rear in gear.

He opened the glove compartment and fished out the novel and pocket flashlight. It was a new novel, only three years old, an allegorical piece set in the far future and written by some Brit named Huxley.

He opened on the dog-eared page.

"Like meat, like so much meat."

"There was a thing called the soul, and a thing called immortality."

"Do ask Henry where he got it."

"But they used to take morphia and cocaine."

"And what makes it worse, she thinks of herself as meat."

"Two thousand pharmacologists and bio-chemists were subsidized in A.P. 178."

"He does look glum," said the Assistant Predestinator, pointing at Bernard Marx.

"Six years later it was being produced commercially. The perfect drug."

"Let's bait him."

"Euphoric, narcotic, pleasantly hallucinant."

"Glum, Marx, glum." The clap on the shoulder made him start, look up. It was that brute Henry Foster. "What you need is a gramme of soma."

Upon finding out what she did for a living, his first reaction had been more or less that of poor Marx. But something had told him–whether it was the whiskey or something else–that he might be overreacting. She was fun, she liked to read as much as he did, she played piano, violin, the banjo, and her voice! Damn, what a voice!

He put down the book to adjust the side mirror, just so that the front of the speakeasy–an ancient, two-story affair, whose wood panel construction dated back to 1870–was fully reflected to him. He waited. Rouge was in the doorway again, backlit by smoky yellow light as she threw the finger at the mongoose. She stormed down the front steps, the skirt of her purple evening dress swirling as her black hair bounced at her shoulders.

The alligator rumbled again, and Rouge froze in her tracks, halfway between the front door and station wagon: it sounded much, much closer. Shadow ran the yellow-white beam of the flashlight over the pond, hoping to catch its eyeshine and maybe scare it off. A few tiny lights danced on the water's surface, soon fleeing into the night; cottonmouths, he judged. He brought the beam in closer to shore. Then he saw it.

The gravel drive was mere inches higher than the water's edge; a short distance into the water, the huge, old alligator's glistening black head rose two whole feet above the surface, its eyes shining back at him like a pair of phosphorescent coins. Its tan, scaly throat inflated; the powerful armored tail lifted clear of the pond, and then came down with a hard, loud slap. It let out another huge, open-mouthed rumble that vibrated Shadow's bones.

He glanced in the mirror and saw Rouge still standing there, wide-eyed and frozen with fear. Wordlessly, he put the station wagon in reverse, and gently backed up. Gravel crunched reassuringly under the tires. When the car was about six feet from her, Rouge regained her wits and nonchalantly strode to the passenger side door and climbed in. "You okay?" he asked.

"I hate 'em, Shad," she breathed out, her breath smelling of cheap tequila and oily, cloyingly sour reefer.

He put the car in drive and gave it some gas. The stagant, wet air turned into a cool breeze as the car gained speed. "They don't bother you–"

"Until you bother them first," she finished, "I know, I know." She dipped into her handbag and brought out a thin, wrinkled roll of paper and a lighter. "Just ask my dad."

Shadow's nose wrinkled as she lit the joint and took a drag. Tobacco was one smell he never minded, but there was something in reefer smoke that always made him feel antsy at best, and viciously paranoid at worst. He'd never told her his dislike, and in fact he usually did his best to hide it. At any rate, she never seemed to notice.

Tonight, she did notice. "What?"

It was too late to hide it, but he wasn't sure what to say.

"What's wrong, Shad?"

Finally he said quietly: "I'd rather you didn't do that right now."

She took one more drag, and then stumped it out in a cupholder that normally served as Shadow's ashtray. "Your ride, your rules," she said casually, though her face betrayed her annoyance. "Why're we going to the beach now, in the black of the damn morning?"

He was glad she'd decided not to argue. "It's a special kind of beach," he told her, "found it when I was a kid. You can see both the sunrise and sunset go into the ocean, sometimes the Green Flash if you're lucky."

She grinned wickedly. "We spending the whole day and night there?"

Shadow allowed himself a small, sly smile as he turned down a bend, taking the car into a tunnel of Spanish moss. "Yep."

"But why now?"

"It's not just the sun that makes it special. There are stars in the waves."

"You mean starfish?" She made a face. "I picked one of those up once. I let it crawl on my arm for a while, but my dad had to pull it off. They stick like glue, it turns out."

Shadow's smile turned into a smirk. "Not starfish. Think of real stars, like nighttime out at your dad's house, but in the ocean too."

"The sky's gonna be that clear tonight?"

"Not 'til tomorrow: it'll be pretty cloudy. No, I'm not talking about reflections: there's a whole sky's worth of stars, in the water."

Rouge raised a curious, albeit skeptical eyebrow. "Some kind of water babies, you think? Sea fairies, some miracle from God Above?"

Shadow shrugged. "I don't know. But the stars only show up at night, all spring and all summer, on every wave chop and every splash you make."

She scooted over in the front seat as they left the moss tunnel and came onto the main road that ran southeast toward the Gulf of Mexico. Delta bound, cher amí. Just like Ellington and his orchestra.

Her warm body pressed pleasantly on him, and she kissed him on the neck. "Mon homme, êtes merveille. I bet it's beautiful."

Mon homme. My man. It was a simple phrase, common to both Standard and Cajun French, but those words from her soft red lips sent an erogenous tingle through the entire front of his body, face to feet.

She definitely knew the effect those words had on him. His cheeks warmed as she continued to mumble them into his neck. He smelled more reefer on her breath than tequila. "Why didn't you stay for the whole show?" she asked, "I thought you liked watching me work?"

Do I? Watching her dress fall from her shoulders as she trotted out one of Louis Armstrong's latest hits, slip to the crimson dragonfly tattoo on the small of her back as she tapped old ragtime tunes, and finally slipping completely off her body as she prepared to hammer out his favorite Liszt rhapsody, had been a truly magical experience. Magical, until he'd looked around, and saw three dozen other men drunkenly gawking at her the same way he was. Like meat. Then he was just angry. Hell, he was still angry, he realized, as he took his exit toward the coast and the little cove that sheltered Glowing Beach.

"Shad?"

He didn't have the right to anger, of course. Just before Shadow went off to ROTC, Shadow's father Julian told him this: "Life is a series of trade-offs, Shad. Pick a set of 'em you can live with, and roll with 'em. But you do have to pick." The following day, his father and mother announced their divorce.

"Shad?"

So here he was, in love with a woman–a brainy, talented, unbelievably gorgeous woman–who earned her bread with her beauty. If he couldn't stand the attention she got from it, that was his problem, not hers. Besides–

"Shad. You awake?"

He blinked, and realized that the car was parked at the edge of a clearing, patched alternately with grass and sandy soil. A palisade of oaks, slash pines, cypresses, and mixed underbrush surrounded the strange clearing. Belatedly, Shadow realized he'd not only not answered her, but he had also made the twenty-minute drive completely on instinct, and in complete silence.

Rouge cracked a wry grin. "Had a little too much to drink?"

"No, I'm pretty much sober."

"Cher, don't lie like that."

"I'm not lying."

"I can smell the whiskey on your breath. How much have you had?"

"A lot less than you have, mon cherí."

She laughed. "How much?"

"A glass, on the rocks." He paused. "Honestly, it's the same reason I went outside."

"How do you mean?"

"You smoke reefer to calm down, right?"

"Yeah."

"I think it does the opposite, to me anyway. That's why I went outside."

"Oh. Then why haven't you said anything before?"

"Because…" He realized he hadn't actually formulated a reason why, because he hadn't thought too deeply about why reefer smoke would make him so anxious. It just did. But he had to say something, if only to get her out of the car in time to show her the wonders beyond the treeline. He turned fully toward her. "Because it does calm you down. I just don't like having the smoke hang around me like that, you know?"

Rouge smiled. Though obscured by the half-light generated by the headlights, he saw that smile. It no longer cut with her usual wry humor; it was one of her rare, completely sweet smiles that he lived to see, the kind that popped up whenever he brought her a new book. The erogenous chord plucked by her mon homme's and mon cher's tingled through him again. She leaned forward, and kissed him. "Coullion," she chided softly, "no wonder you're so moody and uptight." She looked around. "This the place?"

"Yeah." Shadow rubbed his eyes, subconsciously licking his lips to prolong the sensation of the kiss. Duty at Jackson Barracks had awoken him about 4 AM, the previous morning; but he could do without sleep for a few hours more. "This is our campsite. C'mon, I'll show you the stars."

Upon killing the Model B's loud puttering engine, they were suddenly immersed in the songs of crickets, of leaves rustling in the sea breeze, of flowing saltwater on sand. Suddenly she said: "Wait. We're going through the woods?"

"Yeah."

Rouge tisked as she got out. "I don't think you appreciate how few dresses and shoes I have, Shad." She pulled off her arm-length white gloves, then kicked off her shoes. "I went hungry to buy all this. I will not have it torn up."

Shadow got out too, suddenly feeling a kink in his lower back from sitting for so long. He rubbed the butt of the flashlight into the afflicted muscle for a few moments. When he turned around to see what she was doing, he said: "You don't want to go hiking like that."

"Did you pack yourself a dress?"

He opened the bed of the station wagon and found his huge, drab green rucksack. He pulled out a set of socks and field shoes, along with his exercise shorts and an Army canvas jacket. "Here, these should hold off the briars."

She came around to look at the offered wardrobe under his light. The sweet smile again. "Thanks." She kissed him on the cheek. "Can I keep them?"

"As long as you want."

He led her down a narrow deer track that wound madly through the trees and brush, down a dry ditch, and back up into the brush. Branches and thorns picked at their clothes, while pine straw and old leaves crunched with each of their steps. Suddenly, the line of foliage broke, and there was the beach.

Shadow turned off the flashlight, and Rouge gasped. He grinned back at her in the dark. "Bienvenue."

In daylight, strands of white foam would have edged the shallow waves as they rolled onto the grainy beige sand. Tonight, each and every wave became a galactic arm in miniature, exploding with billions, no, trillions of microscopic, sapphire-colored stars.